Writing grants for fun and profit

Sasha Mikheyev

July 21, 2023

About me

  • Evolutionary biologist
    • Work with venoms and the evolution of diseases (in honey bees)

About yourself

Outline

  • Foolproof Grant Template
  • Individual exercises
    • Exercise 1: review a grant proposal on community health
    • Exercise 2: review a grant proposal on coffee drinking
  • Breakout group: Making a pitch
  • Summary

Next session

  • Prepare a short grant proposal on the topic of your study
  • Peer review
  • We go through a selection of the proposals in the next session

Why write grants?

In addition to money

  • Excellent opportunity to focus your thoughts
  • Explore new ideas, and read new literature
  • You can get feedback on your ideas
  • You can get meet new collaborators
  • Experience
  • Getting grants builds reputation

Foolproof Grant Template

Sample grant: community health

I am writing to you because we need money to help our community. We are a small group, called Healthy Community, and we do a lot of good things. Our town has many health problems and we want to fix them. We think we need about $50,000 for our project.

Our project is to make everyone in our town healthier. We want to do many things like start a fitness club, provide free health check-ups, and teach people about healthy food. We believe that if people are healthier, they will be happier and more productive.

We plan to start the fitness club in a local park. We will invite everyone to join and do exercises like jogging, yoga, and aerobics. We hope that people will enjoy the fitness club and become more active.

We will also provide free health check-ups. We will invite doctors from the local hospital to check people’s health and give advice. We hope that this will help people to detect and treat health problems early.

We will teach people about healthy food. We will organize cooking classes and nutrition workshops. We hope that people will learn to eat healthier and prevent diseases like diabetes and heart disease.

We believe that our project will make a big difference in our town. We hope that you will support us. Thank you for considering our proposal.

Short responses, please

We propose to investigate the effects of coffee drinking on human health. We intend to conduct a comprehensive research study that aims to establish whether coffee consumption can lead to significant health benefits or risks. We request a grant of $100,000 to fund our research.

Our research project will involve a sample of 1,000 adults, aged 20-60 years, from our local community. We will categorise these participants into two groups based on their coffee consumption habits: heavy coffee drinkers (more than 3 cups per day) and non-coffee drinkers. We will collect data through surveys and health check-ups over a one-year period.

We hypothesise that heavy coffee drinkers will show different health outcomes compared to non-coffee drinkers. We will monitor common health indicators such as blood pressure, cholesterol levels, body mass index (BMI), and self-reported levels of stress and fatigue.

The findings from our research will contribute to the scientific understanding of the health effects of coffee and will be of interest to health professionals and the general public. We also believe that our research could have significant implications for dietary guidelines and public health strategies.

Write single words, if possible

Breakout group exercise: Making a pitch (30 minutes)

As you saw, it is key to capture the audience’s attention. The way to do it is to link your work to a big picture. We will practice doing this.

  • Form groups of 3 people
  • Every person spends 10 minutes preparing a three-minute pitch
  • Give the pitch, and get feedback
  • Rotate roles

Pitch summary

Summary

  • Grant writing is follows a formula
  • The “Big Picture” is key
  • You should be able to get a reader interested early
  • There are lots of benefits to writing (and getting) grants aside from 💰

Next session

  • Write a 500-word grant proposal on the topic of your study
  • Get feedback from your group
  • Each group sends me a grant for critique next workshop
    • Does not have to be the best grant, pick something we can learn from
  • We go through a selection of the proposals in the next session and discuss them